Guiding Light of The Month

Grant, O Divine Teacher, that we may know and accomplish our mission upon earth better and better, more and more, that we may make full use of all the energies that are in us, and Thy sovereign Presence become manifest ever more perfectly in the silent depths of our soul, in all our thoughts, all our feelings, all our actions.
- The Mother

This month’s newsletter edition catches a glimpse of Book 7, Canto 3 of Savitri, ‘The entry into the Inner Countries’. Savitri determined in the previous episode to pursue the finding of her Soul. In this canto, each line reveals something that will aid us, in our journey’s course as we search the inner countries for our now, ‘lost’ soul. Savitri’s initial entry onto the inner countries faces resistance, but resolute Savitri persists and pushes her entry inside and moves on discovering or encountering various parts and planes of her being.

Before proceeding on, it is useful to reckon why Savitri had decided to enter into her inner countries. It is to discover her soul as commanded by her inner voice in her moment of despair, in the dense and dark night, as she was sitting beside sleeping Satyavan. She first enters the world of subtle matter and then into the sense-driven life (or the Kingdom of Little Life). Then she ventures into the Kingdom of greater life. In all of these, there is no sign of the soul-presence and entities therein move on mechanically or chaotically in all randomness, amounting to wasteful energy with no fruitful culmination. Savitri then enters a brilliant and ordered space with a distinct touch of the organizing mind with its monarch at the helm, Reason. In this tight ordered space, there is no room for imagination to take flight into viewless vistas nor is there scope for the high leaps of thoughts that fashion new, unknown worlds. The presence of the soul is still lacking and Savitri moves on, politely declining that space, for she was seeking her Soul. At last she breaks into a new world of subtler breath where she watches beings moving, "strange goddesses with deep-pooled magical eyes" who seemed to hold in them more than any of the other beings she had met before. She resists the temptation to settle in this space and live with the goddesses. As determined earlier, resolute Savitri moves on the less trodden path pointed out by these goddesses, seeking for her Soul. On this path Savitri meets "a few bright forms" who look at her "with calm immortal eyes”. In this realm,

“There was no sound to break the brooding hush;

One felt the silent nearness of the soul.”

What is the inherent message in this for us, since Savitri is but a guide on our Spiritual journey? The answer to this question needs to be worked out by each one of us. No one journey will be exactly the same, one can presume, since each nature, although generically similar, comes with its special combination of hues, habits, tendencies to be looked into and worked out. This inward journey, we have been promised, if it brings us to the central truth of our being, would then launch us into another realm of existence, that exists only to express that truth of our being re-discovered. Between that and our current state of being appear an endless single path, winding most of the time, lost to the horizons far, far away. But a first step is needed and usually it will be a testing first step, which all the forces of the nether world would seek to hamper and hinder. It is a higher quality in us that would be eventually the saving grace, with blind faith, perhaps, that would enable that first move to be attempted, and later on, to stay on course. Let us allow the prayer above to urge us on to surge forward.

Savitri's problem is to
penetrate appearance and reach the reality about herself. This is a spiritual
quest leading to a spiritual end. The nature of the quest, the stages in the
progress, and the configuration of the goal, all must defy description in
everyday language, which is no more than one of the functions or manifestations
of the appearance.

Hence the poet is obliged to
resort to a parable and to the language of symbols. The 'parable' of Savitri's
search for her soul spans across several cantos, and symbol regions with their
contours, laws and inhabitants are passed in review, and Savitri is shown as
making her progress through the 'inner countries', even as, in Book II,
Aswapati is shown as careering through the occult worlds in the cosmos.

Right at the commencement of her quest, a
voice tells Savitri that her aim should be to "help man to grow into the
God", not to achieve her own salvation alone; in other words, the sorrow
and darkness threatening her life with Satyavan, being symptomatic of the present
human destiny, should be tracked to their source, struggled with and mastered
finally.

As Savitri approaches the 'inner
countries', she is confronted by an ebony gate barring her passage. From within
comes the porter's "formidable voice" of forthright warning to
Savitri. Although this serpent-guardian and its attendant hounds, trolls,
gnomes and goblins raise hideous rout, Savitri forces the gate open and enters,
unconcerned and unaffected, the inner worlds. Who is this forbidding portress? Who
are her attendants? Always, when one starts on a new adventure, a nameless fear
and its progeny of hesitations and vague premonitions seem to bar the way.

One needs courage and resolution
to withstand these sullen initial impediments that try to prevent the first
step being taken. However, they have no effective power to throw back; they can
frighten, and if their bluff is called, they are really powerless.

The occult inner continents follow one
after another; these are the new fields of Savitri's cognitive experience.
There is, first, the world of 'subtle matter', analogous to the world Aswapati
(as described in Book II, canto 2) passes through—analogous but not identical,
for no two spiritual quests are exactly the same. This dense region "of
subtle Matter packed"—a sort of no-man's land between the dusk of
subconscience and the first streaks of life—leads presently to,

...a form of things,

A start of finiteness, a world of sense:

This sense-driven life is
without order, without direction, without meaning; as with ignorant masses
clashing in the dark, there is motion without aim, or striving without positive
result. Such must be the fate of all endeavours when "the sense's instinct
(is) void of soul/Or when the soul sleeps hidden void of power".

Savitri, guided by "the saviour
Name", edges round this chaotic world of "disordered impulses",
the kingdom of little life, and enters the kingdom of greater life, "a
giant head of Life ungoverned by mind or soul". The Life-Force itself
rages here in its elemental vastness; it is no tenuous trickle, but verily
"a spate, a torrent of the speed of Life" breaking "like a
wind-lashed driven mob of waves/Racing on a pale floor of summer sand".
Blind but fierce, aimless but irresistible, the heady current of this unleashed
force achieves marvellous results through inadvertence:

Out of the nether unseen deeps
it tore

Its lure and magic of disordered
bliss,

Into earth-light poured its maze
of tangled charm

And heady draught of Nature's
primitive joy

And the fire and mystery of
forbidden delight

Drunk from the world-libido's
bottomless well,

And the honey-sweet poison-wine
of lust and death,

But dreamed a vintage of glory
of life's gods,

And felt as celestial rapture's
golden sting.

This is the world of primitive
heroism, compact of great striving and impressive results; fighters, daring
explorers, uncalculating hedonists, restless dreamers, magicians, lovers,
haters, fill this world. There is the clash of violent opposing furies, there
are alternations between fear and joy, ecstasy and despair. But, whatever its
particular tinge, life in this region is everywhere intense; and speech has a
downrightness, and song "its ictus of infallibility". Yet all this
marvel and splendour has no sure base on Truth, but are reared on shifting
sands compounded of half-truths and gross-errors. Total perversion is possible
and sometimes reigns unabashed:

Here in Life's nether realms all
contraries meet;

Truth stares and does her works
with bandaged eyes

And Ignorance is Wisdom's patron
here:

Those galloping hooves in their
enthusiast speed

Could bear to a dangerous
intermediate zone

Where Death walks wearing a robe
of deathless Life.

Here too lies "the valley
of the wandering Gleam", a self-created self-perpetuating nightmare
death-in-life. Savitri withstands the terror and the lure, the passion and the
pain, and steadily journeys forward to 'fresh woods and pastures new'.

The next region is "a brilliant
ordered Space", fed and fostered by reason. The impetuous Life-Force is
held in leash by reason. The passage has thus been from a Dionysian to an
Apollonian world. Yet control too can be carried too far. Fleeing from the riot
of exuberance, one can canter into the utter formality of death:

The ages' wisdom, shrivelled to
scholiast lines,

Shrank patterned into a
copy-book device.

It is, no doubt, a balanced
reign, but also a cabinned reign; there is no room or scope for the play of
imagination, for daring leaps of thought, for the unrestrained climb of the
spirit. It is like the cloistered virtue of "a highbred maiden with chaste
eyes/Forbidden to walk unveiled the public ways". There is a mean
self-sufficiency, a petty perfection here that effectively rules out
"rhythms too high or vast", the play of high ideas, and the sovereign
richness and variety of life in the Spirit. In this "quiet country of
fixed mind", an authoritative spokesman accosts Savitri and assures her
that this is truly "the home of cosmic certainty" where all is
"docketed and tied"; thoughts apotheosis has fashioned this realm;
here reign order and safety, clarity and peace. But Savitri is ill at ease in
this cold small world, "this ordered knowledge of apparent things";
she cannot abide here, she must seek her soul elsewhere. Her decision
surprises, and even offends, some of the self satisfied inhabitants of this
place, while one, wiser and sadder than the rest, murmurs:

Is there one left who seeks for a Beyond?

Can still the path be found, opened the
gate?

Undaunted, unwearied, Savitri
passes on till she arrives at a place thronged by a crowd of, "brilliant,
fire-footed, sunlight-eyed... messengers from our subliminal greatnesses/Guests
from the cavern of the secret soul".

Savitri is attracted by these
"strange goddesses with deep-pooled magical eyes", and she would like
to live with them and share the light of their life, but first she will pursue
her quest for the discovery of her secret innermost soul. Surely, these bright
creatures will help her in her quest. How may I, she asks,

.. .find the birthplace of the occult
Fire

And the deep mansion of my secret soul...

The amazing answer comes:

O Savitri, from thy hidden soul we
come...

O human copy and disguise of God

Who seekst the deity thou keepest hid

And livest by the Truth thou hast not
known,

Follow the world's winding highway to its
source.

There in the silence few have ever
reached,

Thou shalt see the Fire burning on the
bare stone

And the deep cavern of thy secret soul.

Inaccessible to—not negotiable
by—any but "rare wounded pilgrim-feet", the great winding road now
bears the tread of Savitri's feet, and "a few bright forms" emerge
from unknown depths and look at her "with calm immortal eyes":

Taking a brief look into Vedic Cosmogony. Shatapatha
Brahmana depicts the Myth of Creation in this way.“At the beginning was the Self (Atman).He was Alone. He looked around and found
nobody else except himself.He said: “I
Am…” But there was no other name to say, for he was alone. … He was not happy. He
wanted Another. it can be only for one reason, for delight.”

THE FIRST CREATION: The Eternal Night

“Out of Himself He cast
“a luminous shadow”:- gradually denying
himself, withdrawing his Supreme Knowledge from His Supreme Power, becoming
unaware of these worlds as Himself.

THE SECOND CREATION:

When the first Involution
took place and the Light was turned into the Darkness, “the Creation became as
if unsteady.It could not sustain
itself, so the Supreme Self had to enter it.And when He has entered, as the text says: “Himself by Himself”, the
Creation became steady.”

From this point onward the Evolution starts to
takes place:

“A soul of the Divine is
here slowly awaking out of its involution and concealment in the material
Inconscience.” - says Sri Aurobindo in The Synthesis of Yoga. So, actually
there were two Creations (Involutions) before the Evolution could take place:
first, out of Himself he created the worlds, and then he entered them, plunging
into the darkness and lying down at the bottom of the Inconscient.

August
4th -Talk by Prof Vladimir
Yatsenko

Above are four operative
functions of the consciousness in the Vedantic tradition: which are defining
consciousness as an interaction of Knowledge and Power, Name and Form.

Samjnana is the contact of consciousness with an image of
things by which there is a sensible possession of it in its substance; if
Prajnana can be described as the outgoing of apprehensive consciousness to
possess its object in conscious energy, to know it, Samjnana can be described
as the inbringing movement of apprehensive consciousness which draws the object
placed before it back to itself so as to possess it in conscious substance, to
feel it.

Ajnana is the operation by which consciousness dwells
on an image of things so as to govern and possess it in power.

Vijnana is the original comprehensive consciousness
which holds an image of things in its essence, totality and parts and
properties; it is the original, spontaneous, true and complete view of it which
belongs properly to the supermind and of which mind has only a shadow in the
highest operations of the comprehensive intellect.

Prajnana is the consciousness which holds as image of
things before it as an object with which it has to enter into relations and possess
by apprehension and analytic and synthetic cognition.

These
four, therefore, are the basis of all conscious action....There are secret
operations in us, in our subconscient and superconscient selves, which precede
this action, but of these we are not aware in our surface being and therefore
for us they do not exist. If we knew of them, our whole conscious functioning
would be changed.

-
Sri Aurobindo

August
5th – Reading from AIM magazine – July 2018

1.
Renunciation and enjoyment

It talks about
how human mind is currently attached to sensuous satisfactions. To overcome
that self-denial or external renunciation is necessary for the soul to break
out of the clogged sensory pleasures. That does not mean self-torturing which
is an offence to the Divine seated within us. The enjoyment should be to see
and feel the divine expressing itself in everything within us and without us.

2.
Detachment

Our mind has the
power of detachment and it can be strengthened by a certain attitude of
indifference to the things of the body. While keeping the body in order, we
should not be too much worried about what best to eat and how much sleep
etc....More than the aid of physical ailments the mind should be trained to a
greater potentiality of vigour from the mental and vital energy.

3.
Knowing and Seeing God in the world

When one becomes
a Yogin raising his step from lower knowledge and gets higher illumination, he
can illumine the lower and make it a part of higher knowledge. He becomes a
channel of God consciousness and God action in the world. He sees nothing but
God in every form and action whether be data of science, philosophy, all
activities of past, present and future. In everything he can bring the
illumined vision and his liberated power of the spirit.

4. The Yoga of Divine Love

The Supreme
Being

Supreme
Being is also the Universal Being. To enter into more intimate relation with
him we should approach in the growing knowledge, not in ignorance. This supreme
Being guides us in whatever way we approach correcting our distorted ways which
is the beginning and finally with developing consciousness complete Divinity is
realised.

August
12th – Reading of passages from Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, War and
Self-Determination

The Spiritual Aim and Life

Jared guided us in the process of understanding the
passages read.

Right now our society is founded upon the
contracts and associations to bring harmony, otherwise there will be never
ending conflicts, clashes of egos. Sri Aurobindo says still it is far from a
society founded upon spirituality. Our civilised mentality has only created
excessive needs and desires with science developing more mechanical devices and
Nature not allowed to bring about the spiritual heart in man.

August
19th – Reading of passages from Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, War and
Self-Determination

Continuation
of The Spiritual Aim and Life

When the more advanced minds begin to declare
civilisation at the peak brings only more confusion, stagnation and decay, to
remedy this human mind goes back to think of more science and more mechanical
devices. This means to carry a disease to its height is the best way to
cure.This will push back the spiritual element in man far back.

The socio-religious machinery in the name of
giving spiritual freedom only binds man in imperious yoke and an iron prison.
So salvation of true nature of the soul is lost!

Looking forward to Sri Aurobindo’s remedy for
all these traumas in the later passages when read.

August
15th – Darshan Day, Sri Aurobindo’s 146th Birth Anniversary

It was indeed a great blessing for all the
members to get immersed inSri
Aurobindo’s consciousness when our youth and children through their prayer
reading and the enacting of Sri Aurobindo’s andMother’s life made it immensly soulful! Sri Ramanathan gave us the joy
of hearing to the Spiritual journey of Sri Aurobindo in a very clarified way.

As
always Popat Bhai arranged for a delicious dinner after the programme.

Thanks to Sanjay and Shailaja for a beautiful
introduction and vote of thanks.

There is an old Hindi saying, “if you want to find a person who has not taken bath in the Holy Ganges, you do not have to go far, they will be among the residents of Varanasi (Benares)”. So who does not know the significance of Fort Canning Hill in Singapore’s history? Well, many residents of Singapore, that’s who. Many of us often work near the hill (yours truly included), some go for walks on its manicured lawns with their partners, while some often shop near the place, some others even stay in its vicinity. The hill in the heart of the city looks over us like a guardian angel, like it has always done for hundreds of years, while we simply ignore it and rush to earn a living, marry someone dear, or offer a prayer at a church, mosque or temple at its foothills.

It probably also gave refuge to a fleeing Srivijayan prince, Parameswara who arrived in Singapura, hundreds of years ago, probably one of his descendants, Sultan Iskandar Shah, the fifth and last ruler of pre-colonial Singapore, even lays buried there. But what we learnt for sure was it was the last hiding spot for Lieutenant-General Percival and his core team of commanders. Lt-General Percival was General Officer Commanding Malaya in World War Two when the Japanese invaded Malaya. While he is remembered often as the man who surrendered the island and over 130,000 men when Singapore surrendered to the Japanese, we learnt that he did not have the resources to defend Singapore. With HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse destroyed 3 days after the attack on Pearl Harbour, with not enough tanks, nor enough planes to defend the island, and finally blindsided by an attack on the western front, there was not much his British army could do.

Thanks to Jeya Ayadurai, Savita Kashyap, and their colleague Joanne, we had a refreshing multimedia history lesson at The Battlebox on Fort Canning, just four days before Singapore’s national day which falls on 9th August. The ‘walk’ itself was much shorter than usual as we only had a short walk from the meeting point to The Battlebox via the Spice Garden and passing by the tomb of Sultan Iskandar Shah. Certainly Fort Canning is worth a visit again for one and all, both for its greenery as well as its historical significance.

The uniqueness of this walk did not end there, it was one of the rare walks where the brunch was held at the Sri Aurobindo Society’s (SAS) room inside SIFAS. While the walk started with a small group in the morning, by the time we were at The Battlebox, the group had become larger and it included Mr and Mrs Yash Mehta who both grew up in Pondicherry Ashram and their daughter Mili. When we reached the SAS room, a larger group of devotees were waiting, including Prof Vladimir Yatsenko and the host Arjun Madan. The sublimity of the meditation at the centre had its own uniqueness and that spread to the prayers that followed. While most of us left after partaking the brunch, a dedicated group of youngsters went back to rehearse for the programme on 15th August.

All that has been renews in him its birth,All that can be is figured in his soul.

Botanical
Name: Terminalia Catappa

Common Name: Tropical Almond

Spiritual
Significance: Spiritual Aspiration

On a dim ocean of subconscient lifeA formless surface consciousness awoke:A stream of thoughts and feelings came and went,A foam of memories hardened and becameA bright crust of habitual sense and thought,A seat of living personalityAnd recurrent habits mimicked permanence.

This month’s Newsletter edition carries as the theme the title of Canto two of Book seven of Savitri, “The Parable of the Search for the Soul”. In the previous edition, we saw the union of Savitri with Satyavan and the immense joy with which this was lived. At the same time, as a shadow to this joy, she lived the pain of the knowledge of Satyavan’s impending fate. It seemed as a reflection of our own state of being, with joy and pain as inevitable roommates in the same house, in a lesser or amplified degree. Her inner countries were out of her reach at least at that moment. She lived alone with the impending knowledge of Satyavan’s fate and sank into deep sorrow and dejection. In this episode, she sits alone in the night, her heart heavy with grief, each ticking moment tearing a page off her beautiful life with Satyavan. This scene paints in our minds a grim picture of an earnest young woman in distress, desperation and dejection.

Savitri’s is a noble nature, a being full of deep love and generosity, a being divine, if not wholly in view of her Divinity, at this point of the epic. There a force around that helps, a hand that guides. As an answer to her silent cry of despair, a voice arose in her at this curiously propitious moment and changed the course of her life. This was a defining moment, we will find, as it brought her on the path that she must take. It indicated to her the source she must reach and from which gain her strength and direction to conquer the cause of her current pain. Her initial reaction to that voice was an expression of dejection and hopelessness, a tendency to drift along with the whips of fate towards a natural progression to its end. However, that voice is persistent and reminds her of her mission upon earth. Something in Savitri awakes and overpowers the dejection of her surface being and takes over her life from thence. Without resistance, her mind falls silent, her heart still and she lets her real, truest Self reveal itself to her, from which she will receive all directions for her every move.

This canto, in a story, gives us the message of life as it is and life towards which we must progress. This canto is one of the many that reveals Sri Aurobindo’s vision for the human race. It recognises the plight that the race has put itself into, its plunge into the abyss of darkness and ignorance, a result of which is pain. It is clear that we are needed to rise above the stroke dealt on us by the hands of fate. In order to do that, one needs to pull one’s consciousness away from the exterior and focus within and live the reality within. This task requires from us a silencing of the mind and the stilling of the heart (or vital). We probably know what this entails, in the usual consciousness. Are we able to leave this heavy concentration on our outer lives and turn within? Are we able to silence our noisy mind which at best is a chaotic market place of varied transactions? Are we able to receive with equanimity all that comes our way or allow only those that uplift us? Then only the voice speaks to us in the silence and stillness of our being and the needed is done. Till then, this task of preparation is ours with the Guidance of Grace. This is the sadhana before us.

This month of August venerates the birth of Sri Aurobindo. Let us remember him for his vision for the human race and its evolution into a supramentalised race living the divine here on earth in matter and in life. Let us take stock of where we stand today as we prepare to salute him and hold his revelations before us for our progress. Let us be his true children and take a plunge into ourselves to know ourselves for what we are and transform for the better, all the time invoking the presence and guidance that alone can transform our nature.

But holding
back her troubled rebel heart,Abrupt, erect and strong, calm like a hill,Surmounting the seas of mortal ignorance,Its peak immutable above mind’sair,A Power within her answered the still Voice:“Iamthyportionherechargedwiththywork,As thou myself seated for ever above,Speak to my depths, O great and deathless Voice,Command, for I am here to do thy will.”

Her nights are
sleepless, for still she hears and sees "the dumb tread of Time and the
approach of ever-nearing Fate". Then one night she is startled by a mighty
voice invading her mortal life; she is jerked into a trance and becomes "a
stone of God lit by an amethyst soul". What use Savitri—"O spirit, O
immortal energy"!—coming to "this dumb deathbound earth" if it
was merely to nurse a hopeless grief in a helpless heart? Not passive
sufferance but positive action is expected of her:

Arise, O soul, and vanquish Time and
Death.

Still in her
tranced state, Savitri replies: How can she strive when she has neither the
strength nor the will to fight? Feeble are her chances of success, feeble the
chances of the ignorant race of man responding to the "saviour Light"
from above. "Is there a God whom any cry can move?" Isn't he careless
of mankind, their dolour and their defeat?

What need have
I, what need has Satyavan

To avoid the
black-meshed net, the dismal door,

Or call a
mightier Light into life's closed room,

A greater Law
into man's little world?

For her own problem
there surely is cure enough; she can follow Satyavan to the far off bourne and
there "lie inarmed breast upon breast...forgetting eternity's call,
forgetting God". Almost a drowsy and pendant reply, hardly worthy of
Savitri; the voice therefore admonishes her: "Is this enough, O
spirit?" She has come down with a mightier intent, and it will not do to
shrink from the task:

Cam'st thou not
down to open the doors of Fate,

The iron doors
that seemed for ever closed,

And lead man to Truth's wide and golden road

That runs through finite things to
eternity?

The petulant
human rebel is silenced, and another power, the creator spirit within her,
makes a reply. Savitri is ready for action as a vessel of the immortal Spirit;
when she knows what she has to do, she will readily strive to do it. The voice
answers:

Find out thy soul, recover thy hid self,

In silence seek God's meaning in thy
depths,

Then mortal nature change to the divine.

Human thought
and human sense can be barriers checkmating the passage of the soul to the
Soul; casting away everything, everything has to be gained; and by this means
Savitri will be able to invoke the force of the Supreme and conquer Death.

The voice is withdrawn, and Savitri finds
herself sitting "rigid in her gold motionless pose" by sleeping
Satyavan's side. The sky lours, thunder rumbles, rain hisses; but Savitri sits
impassive still in self-absorbed concentration. She will look into herself, she
will go in quest of her soul (as earlier she had gone in quest of her spouse),
and she will not turn back till she sights and claims her hidden self.

Her first series of insights disclose to
her, "the cosmic past, the crypt-seed and the mystic origins,/The shadowy
beginnings of world fate". It is a vivid and breathless pageantry—from the
cosmic whirl of atomic space, the appearance of huddled masses of matter, the
emergence of life' in algae, plant and tree, in insect, bird and beast, to the
ultimate flowering of 'mind' in man:

Mind nascent laboured out a mutable form,

It built a mobile house on shifting
sands,

A floating isle upon a bottomless sea.

Restless and enterprising, Mind has made
conquests of all sorts and organised the "thousandfold commerce of the
world". Sometimes probing below, sometimes gazing above, Mind has extended
its inquiries into the lower as well as the higher regions of consciousness,
nether Hell as also .high Heaven. Mind has its handmaidens—fancy,
imagination—and they annex vast territories of experience for man to lord over.
In apprehension like a god, yet man can also solicit the dark and devalue
himself:

Man's house of life holds not the gods
alone:

There are occult Shadows, there are
tenebrous Powers,

Inhabitants of life's ominous nether
rooms,

A shadowy world's stupendous denizens...

The Titan and the Fury and the Djinn

Lie bound in the subconscient's cavern
pit

And the Beast grovels in his antre den...

They are best
kept caged and cribbed in the chambers of the underground, for once you start
negotiating with them, they seize you body and soul, pervert all instruments,
press their advantages without mercy, and deluge man's world with blood and
terror:

The terrible Angel smites at every door:

An awful laughter mocks at the world's
pain

And massacre and torture grin at
Heaven:...

Man has propensities both towards good and
evil; to give evil full and free play is to turn God's purposes upside down,
for,

It imitates the Godhead it denies,

Puts on his figure and assumes his face.

A Manichean creator and destroyer,

This can abolish man, annul his world.

Thus man finds
himself at the crossroads where meet opposing paths that show the way either to
the world of the blessed or to the condemned wastes of hell. Man has a past and
future, and the narrow isthmus of the present is his playground of trial and
striving. While his mind is his helper, he cannot wholly depend upon it; mind
too can mislead, unawares sometimes, and sometimes deliberately. There are
other forces, however, to redress the balance, at times also to tilt it to
dangerous consequence:

A portion of us
lives in present Time,

A secret mass
in dim inconscience gropes;

Out of the
inconscient and subliminal

Arisen, we live
in mind's uncertain light

And strive to
know and master a dubious world

Whose purpose
and meaning are hidden from our sight.

But this is no
more than a first report or preliminary finding; deeper meanings, clearer
purposes, emerge on a closer look at the human drama that is being played on
the cosmic stage. Not out of a "blind Nature-Force" has life emerged,
and then mind; the sea of inconscience carries the potencies of life, mind, and
any powers that may be above mind, though all as yet held in suspension as it
were. What is 'involved', nascent or held in suspense comes out when the time
is ripe, and so the evolutionary march begins and continues.

There is a law that controls, yet
transcends, the wide ranges of consciousness, from inert matter to man and the
future superman. It may be that man has his "prone obscure beginnings"
in the jungle ape; but he has not ceased to grow, he has not ceased to hanker
after good and beauty and God, and he has been moving "in a white lucent
air of dreams". The setbacks have been many, the frustrations numberless,
but pioneering man has moved breast-forward, flirted with the omniscient, and
made vague approaches to omnipotence:

Thus man in his little house made of
earth's dust

Grew towards an unseen heaven of thought
and dream

Looking into the vast vistas of his mind

On a small globe dotting infinity.

At last climbing a long and narrow stair

He stood alone on the high roof of things

And saw the light of a spiritual sun.

As Savitri sees
these vistas pass before her, the realisation comes to her that the mighty
Mother has made her,

.. .the centre of a wide-drawn scheme,...

To mould humanity into God's own shape

And lead this great blind struggling world to
light

Or a new world discover or create.

But for this to
be accomplished, the heavenly psyche hidden in Savitri should come out into the
open and "liberate the god imprisoned in the visionless mortal man".